The performance or effectiveness of ads dynamically placed within a web page is typically measured using clickstream data. In a performance based method, when a user clicks on an ad, a URL resource for the ad web page is fetched and loaded into the client browser. Simultaneously, a statistic is updated to increase the relevance of that ad within the context, i.e. within the original web page. An alternative, content matching solution for measuring ad effectiveness uses keywords. A user wishing to place an ad enters keywords or keywords are extracted from an ad's text and used to perform relevance matching to the words within a web page. Both performance based and content matching methods may be combined to select ads that are relevant to the content and that have performed statistically well in similar contexts.
A problem with these existing methods is that they rely on click stream data which is typically coarse grained. A further problem is that these solutions tend to treat all words within the web page substantially the same, regardless of where in the web page the content appears.
What is required is a system, method and computer readable medium for selecting advertisements that makes use of how the attention of a user is directed on the web page.